17.9.10

*** Sidewalk Weekend! ***

Sidewalk Rating: Better than you think

I'd like to welcome you aboard the Northstar lineRelaxing transportation you will findThis service is for you, your friends and your kinGlad you're aboard, hope you ride it againCity to city, you will seeGonna get you there very quick and safelyI hope this ride will help brighten your dayNow I'll tell you the stops that are 'long the wayWe've got Fridley, Coon Rapids, Anoka, tooElk River, Big Lake, but we're not throughGotta go to St. Cloud? There's really no fussHop off at Big Lake, catch the Northstar busSo park your car, then board the trainOnce you ride the Northstar, you'll wanna do it again

By the time I read White’s essay “Here Is New York,” I was a city-side reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and beginning to suspect what he meant by the city’s capacity to bestow “queer prizes,” among them “the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy” that place the inhabitant in “the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.” The meaning of the remark came clear on a cloudy afternoon in Central Park when I came across two men seated on a bench, each with a fanciful parrot resting on his shoulder, engaged in intense discussion accompanied by decisive gestures and rapid changes of expression. The parrots were identical; the two men were as unlike one another as a ferret and a panda—on the near end of the bench a small and heavily damaged white man in a threadbare raincoat, early seventies, not many teeth, sunken chest, furtive demeanor; at the far end of the bench a handsome and handsomely tailored black man, gold jewelry, stylish hat and brocade vest, broad-gauged grin, majestic presence.